I could, without breaking a sweat, create a list of important religion-beat news stories that are, to some degree or another, connected to the sinking birth rates in the Unites States and around the world.
Clashes between Chinese leaders and Muslims inside their borders? Decades of declining numbers of men seeking Catholic priesthood? The sharp decline in the power of “mainline” Protestant churches? American political clashes between red-zip code and blue-zip code regions, usually seen as tensions between rural and urban life. Tensions between Orthodox and progressive Jews. Soaring numbers linked to anxiety and loneliness. And so forth and so on.
So when I saw this headline in The New York Times — “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications“ — I immediately thought to myself, “Here we go again.” I also figured that this would be the topic for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).
Sure enough, this new feature was the global version of a Times story several years ago that led to a GetReligion post with this headline: “New York Times asks this faith-free question: Why are young Americans having fewer babies?” As I wrote at that time:
In a graphic that ran with the piece, here are the most common answers cited, listed from the highest percentages to lowest. That would be, "Want leisure time," "Haven't found partner," "Can't afford child care," "No desire for children," "Can't afford a house," "Not sure I'd be a good parent," “Worried about the economy," "Worried about global instability," "Career is a greater priority," "Work too much," "Worried about population growth," "Too much student debt," etc., etc. Climate change is near the bottom.
The economic and cultural trends are all valid, of course. But they also point toward changes in how modern people in modern economies define and look for “meaning in life” and the beliefs that define those choices.
Think birth, marriage, vocation, death. We are talking about topics that, for several billion people on this planet, are linked to religious faith.
So what did the Times have to say? Here is a crucial summary:
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
There’s more. Read this part carefully and look for that the GetReligion team, since Day 1, has called “religion ghosts.”
The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation. …
(The) era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.
As you would expect, the Times report is packed with the economic and political implications of these trends and I would never argue otherwise.
But where are the obvious religious questions and themes? Finally, near the end, there is this one sentence:
In a speech last Friday during a conference on Italy’s birthrate crisis, Pope Francis said the “demographic winter” was still “cold and dark.”
That’s that, apparently. As you would imagine, the pope’s speech was packed with material that could have helped the Times team flesh out this story. The full text is online, so here is one example:
For the future to be good, we must therefore take care of families, especially young families, who are beset by worries that risk paralysing their life plans. I am thinking of the uncertainty of work, of the fears caused by the increasingly unaffordable costs of raising children: these are fears that can swallow up the future, quicksand that can sink a society. I also think, with sadness, of women at work who are discouraged from having children or have to hide their pregnancies. How is it possible that a woman should feel ashamed of the most beautiful gift that life can offer? Not the woman, but society should be ashamed, because a society that does not welcome life stops living. Children are the hope that gives birth to a people!
You know that many other religious leaders and scholars would have just as much to say, or more.
You can find a very similar hole in, believe it or not, a new Religion News Service story that ran with this headline: “Study: More churches closing than opening.” After looking at some numbers from a new Lifeway report, there is material directly from the heart of liberal Protestantism:
… Another study, from the Center for Analytics, Research and Data, affiliated with the United Church of Christ, painted an even starker picture. That study, published in April, estimated that in the decade ending in 2020, 3,850 to 7,700 houses of worship closed per year in the United States, or 75 to 150 congregations per week. It also projected those numbers will double or triple in the wake of the pandemic.
The biggest reason for church closings is a decline in church membership. A March poll from Gallup found that fewer than half (47%) of Americans say they belong to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from more than 70% in 2000.
Add to that the increasing cost of maintaining aging buildings and paying for capital improvements and a post-pandemic reluctance to return to in-person services. Some congregations will continue to thrive, especially those that convert their sacred space to mixed use or sell part of their land for housing.
Wait a minute.
Can anyone else think of other logical causes of membership decline in some pews more than others?
I’ll end with a long quote on this topic that I have used several times. It’s from a Weekly Standard (RIP) feature entitled “America’s One-Child Policy.” This is hard-edged and still relevant today:
... In a world where childbearing has no practical benefit, people have babies because they want to, either for self-fulfillment or as a moral imperative. "Moral imperative," of course, is a euphemism for "religious compulsion." There are stark differences in fertility between secular and religious people.
The best indicator of actual fertility is "aspirational fertility" – the number of children men and women say they would like to have. Gallup has been asking Americans about their "ideal family size" since 1936. When they first asked the question, 64 percent of Americans said that three or more children were ideal; 34 percent said that zero, one, or two children were ideal. Today only 34 percent of Americans think that a family with three-or-more children is ideal.
But on this question there are two Americas today: a secular population that wants small families (or no family at all) and a religious population that wants larger families.
Religious affiliation is part of the story, but the real difference comes with church attendance.
The thesis statement?
When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they're making a cultural and theological statement.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it on to others.